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Choosing a Computer System for Digital Imaging
from the printers; they make it from the ink and paper. This is one reason to buy
name-brand supplies, it supports the companies. I would not buy off-brand ink
anyway as it can ruin the printer.
Ink comes in two basic types, dye or pigment based. Dye based inks don't last as
long as pigment based. Some printers use pigment for black and dye for color.
They cannot be used together, which is why you can get color shifts in the black
areas, especially if you aren't using color profiling correctly. (They use pigment for
black because it gives better text quality.) I only know of one printer that uses
pigment based color inks: Epson 2000P. That is why they claim the images will last
100 years if printed on the correct paper (e.g. Epson heavyweight matte) and
protected from bright light, smog, etc.
There are two ways to squirt the ink onto the paper. One way involves heating
some of the ink to boiling, which produces pressure and forces it through the
nozzle. The other way uses a piezo-electric device, which flexes when current is
passed through it and forces the ink through the nozzle. Printers that use the first
method usually have the head built into the cartridge so it is replaced every time
you buy a new cartridge. This is usually touted as an advantage, but I figure that
they wouldn't do it unless they had to; boiling the ink probably would clog the
nozzles after a while.
There's my two cents worth. Hope it's of use to someone.
-- Brian Breczinski, May 28, 2002
I used digital cameras for a while then realized that while digital images would
only ever be as good as the resolution in which they were taken, negatives could
always be rescanned. Film cameras can be as small as digital and there are some
very sharp cameras around. From an archival point of view your negatives are way
better than a CD too, but when you do this you need more computer than if you just
shoot digital and download the images from the camera.
The Nikon Coolscan 4000 is the cornerstone of the system. It has fairly nice
software included with good download support from Nikon for new versions and is
very easy to use - feed in the negatives, choose output size and format, crop, adjust
color and go. It's quite fast, and works on a Firewire interface, they even include a
PCI Firewire card in the box. I can't scan prints or pages but I don't really need to. I
haven't used any other negative scanners so I don't know if this is really the best -
but it's very, very good.
A Macintosh dual-1GHz G4 does everything else. It's easy to use and the included
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